Of Delicate Pieces

by A. Lynden Rolland

  “That’s it?” Chase asked in a mundane voice.

  “No,” Reuben answered. “When I was little, I used to get spooked during the hunting trips. I still had to tag along. Family tradition,” he added, ignoring Alex’s humph of disgust. “My big brother used to tell hunting legends to distract me. I can remember one he told me ’bout a curse. Those bedtime stories, they always had lessons, and this one warned us to always, always know the heritage of who we’re hunting.”

  “Why?”

  “The longer their family line, the harder the fight. It’s scary what they can do: make you see things that ain’t there, believe things you wouldn’t usually believe. With this legend I’m thinking, the hunting family chased down a Kindall girl. Now the Kindalls,” he said with a tremor in his voice. “The Kindalls are as old as the Havilahs. This girl warned them that she’d haunt them in a way that would tear them apart, snap their family line. She even winked at them before they killed her. The youngest hunter in the family married that next year. He had a baby girl, and he lost his damn mind, saying the devil was alive in his child. He drowned his own baby in the same place where that witch girl died. They say the baby was winking at her daddy, that she had the same eyes as the witch girl.”

  “I don’t get it,” Chase said.

  “Says the story, each time a baby was born in that hunting family, some part of the child looked like the witch. The hunters kept killing their own children or killing themselves. That witch cursed them something awful. It broke their minds.”

  Chase clasped his hands on top of his head. “How is it possible for a person to alter the appearance of someone who isn’t born?”

  The story cooked in Alex’s mind, turning over and over again until it blackened in her thoughts. Magic was all tricks of the mind. What if Sephi was powerful enough to imprint the image of her face in the minds of the hunters? What if it was powerful enough that they married someone with at least one of her features?

  You’re beginning to think like a dead girl, Chase remarked in her thoughts. She hadn’t realized he was there.

  Reuben looked past them as though he expected someone was listening. “It ain’t all so bad. Alex is part Havilah and part witch. She’s a piece of two families who hated one another.”

  “You’re saying you think people will look on the bright side, and see the glass as half full?”

  At that, they each lowered their eyes to the floor, realizing how ridiculous this sounded.

  Chase rested his hand on Alex’s knee. “You think that’s why Alex looks like Sephi? It might be something like that family in the story?”

  “Sephi was a Kindall girl.” The smugness in Reuben’s tone blotched the space around him. “I think the family in that story is Alex’s family.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The remnants of Alex’s body still influenced her mind. Her nonexistent heart still pounded, and the memory of her mortal throat worried itself dry each time she had to walk the green mile to ABC. She believed Duvall would be pleased to know that the line of her history began so far back, to swaddle herself with that line like the threads of the thin shawls she loved. Instead, Duvall seemed more likely to tighten that line around Alex’s throat. If looks could kill. Even months later, she refused to speak to Alex.

  Little waved Alex to a table. Pax Simone hurried across the room to take a seat next to them.

  “Hey, girls. Don’t forget the Legacy meeting this afternoon. We need to make final plans for the Truce March. My family is excited to meet you, Alex.”

  “It’s still happening?” Alex asked. “The March?”

  Pax lifted a palm. “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “The gifted broke into the city and attacked a spirit.”

  “That was an isolated incident.” Pax waved her hand. “Definitely not from a civilized group.”

  Duvall exited her office with a projection hovering above her head like a thought bubble. Balance, it read and teetered left to right, up and down. She clapped two stones together in her hands. The first row sat up straighter, then the second and the third, and so on until an invisible jolt forced Alex to fix her posture.

  “We have much to accomplish this morning, newburies. And I even prepared a lab, so let us begin.”

  Goggles appeared over Alex’s face. She must have projected them there without realizing it because no one else had them. She ripped them off.

  “Balance,” Duvall began. “Such a light word with such heavy meaning.” Her gaze skimmed her audience. “Stability is what makes the world able to stand on its own two feet without toppling over. Often when it reaches its tipping point in either direction, something occurs to pull it back. People react. Nature reacts. Or history reacts.”

  Balance. Alex wrote the term in her notebook and watched as her pen began to transcribe everything her brain conjured upon considering the word. A gymnastics beam, a cat, the term: equilibrium, a scale, exercise.

  “The bodied have their version of such beliefs. The most prominent example derives from nature: the predator versus the prey. The lion never runs out of antelope to chase, to eat. Yes, Tess?”

  “What about extinction?”

  “There are exceptions to almost every rule. So how does the idea of balance apply to your friendly neighborhood alchemist? Balance provides insight.”

  “I don’t understand.” Madison voiced Alex’s very thoughts. Alex wouldn’t dare to raise her hand in class anymore. As things stood, Duvall wasn’t treating her as low as the Bonds, but Calla used to sit with her hand in the air the entire class without so much as an acknowledgment from Duvall. Embarrassing. Alex’s proverbial skin was not thick enough for that.

  Above them, the word balance turned green and melded together into a single stone.

  “Jade.” Professor Duvall began to march backward, slowly down the center aisle, facing the projection. “Don’t be fooled. It isn’t always green.” She snapped her fingers, changing the tone from green to orange to white and back to green.

  “You are aware of the healing effects of jade, but then there’s its counterpart.” The image shifted from brilliant green to a muddy lime. “Edaj, like its foil, is prominent in Egypt, in the old tombs since much of it was mined long ago, and the substance is rare. Probably why you’ve never heard of it even though both were discovered at the same time as one cannot form without the other.”

  “Do you have an actual edaj stone to show us?” Linton asked.

  Duvall let out a small yelp and slapped her hand over her chest. “The substance is illegal, and even if it wasn’t, it’s far too dangerous to be handled so flippantly. Did you ever pass around nuclear explosives in school when you were alive because they were the topic of a lesson? No.” She shook her head, muttering about stupid questions.

  Alex couldn’t help but smile. She missed spending time with Duvall.

  “Professor?” Madison’s desk sprouted five new pencils. “What does that have to do with insight?”

  “Patience, my dear. Two sibling stones. One used for healing, and one used for harm. When combined, they bestow euphoria.”

  As Alex wrote, her mind supplied her not only the facts Duvall presented, but her immediate inferences, connections, questions, and hypotheses. Add water to fire and you have smoke, and even that dissipates. Add good to bad, and you get indifference, which is again, nothing. Why would the sum of these two parts equal anything?

  She longed to ask.

  “Now, for your lab.”

  A mortar and pestle appeared on Alex’s desk, surrounded by various ingredients and directions.

  Duvall stood near the glass wall of the aquarium, and a family of sea horses swam toward her to watch over her shoulder as the newburies fretted over the lab.

  “As you learned before, the voix stone means what?”

  “Insight,” several newburies replied.

  “And truth. Take the voix stone and turn it in your hand four times,” Duvall instruc
ted.

  Alex picked up the yellow stone and did as she was told.

  “Place it in the mortar. Pick up the ignarus stone and spin it four times in the opposite direction.”

  Alex selected the gray rock and obeyed. Duvall instructed them to follow the rest of the directions. Alex worried she would screw up somehow. There were at least two dozen lines of intricate commands. It wasn’t just adding honey to the mixture but grinding the stones together for twelve minutes and one second before adding the honey, dripping the stream as thin as thread for seventeen seconds. Water had to bubble for twenty-two minutes while flower petals were broken into seven increments.

  During the process, Duvall continued to lecture about the ignarus stone and the use of its services to provide silence. She told stories of its appearance throughout history from monasteries to libraries to secret operations. Alex almost dropped the petals she was supposed to dispense at a rate of one petal per six and a half seconds when Duvall explained that the ignarus stone was used to silence their signals out in space.

  “We travel much further than the bodied, but we must be discrete so as not to frighten them. There have been glitches, however. A large one occurred in 1977.”

  “Are you talking about the Wow! signal?” Linton asked, pausing with a handful of petals.

  Duvall cackled as she continued to stroll aisle to aisle, fixing a mixture here and a wrist flick there. “We need to keep ourselves silenced out in the field, and sometimes we need to silence people who see more than they should and attempt to share it with the world.”

  “What do you mean, Professor?” Madison yelped as her water boiled over.

  “Sometimes, the bodied see pieces of our world. Plants, for instance. Many species are only seen by a dead eye. Anyone ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? Oh, we might need to discuss that. Even after we silenced the guy because he could see with amplified eyes, he went ahead and wrote out his findings in one of our earliest languages. He must have been able to hear us, too. The bodied don’t know the language so it wouldn’t matter except that he drew illustrations.” She shook her head. “What a waste.”

  It took nearly a full hour, but Alex finally finished the lab. She plopped back in her chair, staring at her creation based on voix and ignarus. It contradicted. It was bright but brown. It smelled bitter but sweet. She felt a sad happiness when a realization washed over her.

  Was that the combination of truth and silence? Realization.

  Duvall didn’t hate her. That was Alex’s instant realization.

  Duvall resented the Havilahs, but she couldn’t feel the same about Alex, which was probably infuriating.

  Duvall’s hands were balled into fists, but her glare softened. “There isn’t only black and white, my loves. There are areas of shaded gray. The combination of jade and edaj, healing and pain, provides variations of contentment. The combination of voix and ignarus will give you clarity from what is hounding you.”

  A lumped formed in Alex’s throat. She was painful to Duvall; she was a reminder of hatred and loss.

  No one wants to stare that in the face every day.

  Chapter Thirty

  On the day Rae disappeared, there was a silence Alex hadn’t heard in months. She didn’t realize how much space Rae took up until that space was empty. It took her an hour to track down Skye. Alex begged her to work her magic, to do whatever she did to know when things happened.

  Alex thrust Rae’s blanket into her arms, and Skye’s expression twisted with sadness. Rae was gone.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Skye whispered. “Lost Ones never stay still. And sometimes they don’t choose if and when they travel; it just happens.”

  “Where will she go?”

  “I doubt she knows. Spirits like Rae don’t travel conventionally.” Skye petted the blanket. “Meaning Rae could be standing right here in the same spot, but we aren’t here anymore. She didn’t travel over a length of space; she traveled over a length of time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “For Rae, time may not be linear. It folds, and she might pulse in and out of then, and now, and later.”

  Alex laid her head on the arm of the couch. “How do you know? Did someone tell you that?”

  “I saw a few things when Rae would hold my hand.”

  Alex looked down at her hands, remembering the energy of Rae’s warmth in her fingers. “You think she could talk to us that way?”

  Skye stepped back to examine the sketches covering the walls. “There’s more than one way to communicate. She seemed to like this method a bit better. By the way … ” Skye gestured to the door. “Did you know Chase was outside?”

  She did know, but if he wanted to come in, he would. She could see inside his head, and he was afraid that his sadness would be magnified if he entered the room. He was smart. Rae’s absence was heavy. It felt like trying to remember something you were supposed to do, and knowing you’re in the right place, but you can’t remember what it is.

  Alex sat in silence, absorbing the emotions of the sketches. Most were abstract without defining pictures or figures. In some of them, she could hear music. Senses were eager to overlap now. Kind of like in life when Alex could walk into a kitchen and tell how something might taste because of the smell. Here, she could see music. Hear art. Taste the feel of something.

  The sketches above the mantel fluttered. “Will she come back?”

  Skye had her chin on her hands. “I guarantee it.”

  “You said she can’t choose.”

  “Alex, this world is mental. I’m sure if Rae thinks about it enough her mind will take her back here eventually.”

  Alex mulled over the word: eventually. She hated waiting for things.

  Chase still hadn’t entered the room, and Alex figured she’d better check on him. Without moving from her sullen spot, she opened the door between their minds. There, she could see his memories; he was walking up the hill by the fields, Rae at his side. He bent down to wipe stray pieces of grass from her ankles, and she placed hands on his shoulders before throwing her arms around his neck. Chase’s surprise and fondness filled Alex with warmth, even now, and even though it wasn’t her memory. Rae was special to Chase, too.

  A whishing sound brought her back to herself. She glared up at the sketches. “Shut up,” she murmured.

  “What?” Skye asked.

  “Not you. Rae’s art is noisy sometimes.” An idea occurred to Alex, and she jumped to her feet. “Skye, if you were to touch a sketch with those magic hands of yours, would you be able to see what Rae saw?”

  Skye looked horrified. “I don’t touch art. Or music.” She scooted further away from the black box in the corner. “Or writing. It’s too much.”

  Alex pressed her lips together.

  “Don’t pout. Try to do it yourself.”

  “I can’t touch something and know what it is thinking. That’s your job.”

  “I’m not asking you to.” Skye shoved her hands in her pockets. “What is the noise you hear?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said the sketches are noisy. What do you hear?”

  “Whishing.”

  Skye stepped closer to the pictures. “Like rain falling?”

  Alex shook her head. It was too gentle to have the force of rain.

  “Wind?”

  That was closer.

  “More like … ” Alex crinkled her forehead, “ … sand.”

  The way the pictures fit together, the images pressed together in the center formed what Alex tried so hard not to see.

  Another hourglass.

  At the pinch of the hourglass, Rae had drawn a mess of lights and objects on shelves.

  “What is that?” Skye asked.

  “It’s a shop in Moribund. The one Little showed us.”

  “And who is that?”

  Alex snatched a sketch from the wall. Next to the Moribund sketch was a drawing of Thea’s h
ouse. Rae had been there. In the archway between Thea’s kitchen and living room, Liv was being held by three men. One man held a rifle butt high above Liv’s head, which slumped at a ninety-degree angle. Thea was on her knees with her hands clasped together, her mouth open and screaming.

  “Oh my God.”

  The higher sketches of the hourglass looked hollow, empty. The lower sketches were dark, nearly reaching the pinch of the middle. All the “sand” was at the bottom.

  Time was up.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Alex didn’t dare meditate to get to Liv and Thea. Duvall was out of the question; even if they were on good terms, there was no way she’d be willing to help the family that signed away the lives of the gifted. They couldn’t use the emergency exit outside of Van Hanlin’s classroom because it was sealed after last year’s events.

  Moribund was their only option. The town was holding its annual art fair and Chase suggested they try to escape through Maori’s. Rae might have placed the sketches together for a reason.

  Alex assumed Westfall and his security team would prohibit her from leaving Eidolon. She lied through her shaky voice, saying she’d be more than happy to spend extra time at the health center while the others enjoyed a break at the beach.

  She couldn’t very well enter Gramble Station without the travel agents sounding the alarm, but Skye had showed her not only how to pass through the gate, but how to project. It took them half the day, but Chase and Alex finished walking and projecting their way through Redwood National Forest and into Moribund.

  The beach was vacant because every person, dead or alive, crowded the main streets to watch artists with their water colors, spray paints, pencils, and sculpting clays. Spirits and bodies twirled together down the road to the music coming from a bandstand at the end of the street. The fair gave Alex a chance to hide. She and Chase hurried past the end of the paved road and stepped through the glass of Maori’s store.

  They stopped beneath a group of swaying amulets, and Chase dropped her hand. “Calm down, okay?”